Fallen Angels

About the Fallen Angels series

Before the Black Dagger Brotherhood made her a bestseller, and running alongside it, J.R. Ward's Fallen Angels series pits a reluctant, alcoholic fallen angel named Jim Heron against the forces of Hell in a very literal battle for human souls. Covet opens the series with Jim recruited by an archangel to save seven souls destined for damnation, one per book, each corresponding to one of the seven deadly sins -- Covet's protagonist wrestling greed, Crave's with lust, and onward through envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth, and pride.

Ward sets the series in a grittier, more contemporary version of Caldwell than the Brotherhood's, with a harder-edged tone: military and blue-collar heroes, real-world addiction and trauma, and a central cosmic war between Heaven and Hell playing out through very human-scale stakes. Jim Heron's own arc -- his guilt, his drinking, his reluctant heroism -- anchors the series across all six books even as the featured couple changes.

The series concluded at six novels rather than the seven sins originally implied, ending with Immortal in 2014. It's a strong pick for Brotherhood fans who want Ward's voice with an angels-and-demons frame instead of vampires.

How to read this series

Read in publication order, starting with Covet. Jim Heron's own redemption arc and the wider Heaven-and-Hell conflict build continuously across the series, even though each book centers a new soul he's tasked with saving. Despite an originally implied seven-sin structure, the series concluded at six books with Immortal -- there's no seventh entry to look for. It's set in the same wider Caldwell-adjacent world as the Black Dagger Brotherhood but is a fully separate story with its own cast; you don't need to have read the Brotherhood first.